It's definitely not "just kid stuff" if it gives that impression. There's some seriously talented writers out there that can really grab your imagination.
I recall one "tale" that about a time when SCP failed to secure everything all at once, and a normal guy is detailing the world basically falling apart as long as he can.
In the right hands a lot of these stories could make magnificent movies, but that's a long shot.
I know I love a good opportunity to waste a little time with novel software. It's hard to describe, but it brings me a feeling of joy
This is really neat, I was actually surprised that it "just worked". Usually, as others have pointed out, you have to sacrifice a few goats and utter the forbidden ancient incantations before novelty pieces like this will work at all.
is there anything significant that we can pull from this data? 10 years sounds like a super small amount of time for a star. Does anything really "change" in this interval? or are we going to have to wait another 100, 500, 10,000 years to see anything happen?
I nuked my account probably 2 years ago. I wasn't in a great place personally, or professionally, and FB only contributed to my mindless procrastination. Probably one of the best things I did at the time, and that's not even to mention all of the hectic political and family drama that goes with scrolling your wall.
I'll be interested to see their response to all of this. Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if a good majority of these people were blatantly breaking the rules in some way, and they got caught up in a big sweep to remove those accounts, or someone fscked up and entered the wrong database table name in the "Delete accounts" service behind the scenes.
> The only valid response to this question (a question asked on hacker news of all places)
Hacker News - a site where people make a sport of middlebrow dismissals of others' work and complaining about the features of other sites and software they very likely have never had a single PR accepted for.
The real answer is that PG probably just added to topbar feature to have a karma reward for users to work towards as a means of positive reinforcement (I haven't actually found a specific quote from him on that) and also that the current admins tend to be conservative about adding new features, so likely they don't believe a dark mode would improve the quality of the site enough to be worth the effort.
A few years ago I installed FreeBSD on my main machine, and actually used it for some time (6ish months?).
It was really nice that I could actually google things, and usually come to a mailing list or the FreeBSD manual for my version of the OS, and then actually be able to find what I was looking for and have it work (most of the time).
It's the opposite with Linux. Yeah, this is just another "hey lets copy osx and pretend we're actually doing something real" project, and more than likely, everything will work fine just like in the standard ubuntu, but it's still just another fragment in the already overcrowded and starting-to-stink-from-all-the-dead-projects ecosystem.
I get the freedom to do everything you want, fork this, change that, I get that 100%, but man it would be nice to have Linux be unified.
I read the blog post and couldn't really guess what they did, so I headed over to the actual shop and saw some books. Okay, I thought, another bookstore.
But then I scrolled further down and started seeing red dot sights for rifles and giftcards.
It's things like [1] that really irk me.
Yes, they're working 'hard', yes they deserve compensation, no, there isn't any license conflicts (that I'm aware of) that would make selling eOS illegal, it's the fact that they wrote this justification to make you feel like a thief.
Really, it's just an ubuntu clone with a pretty osx-like gui. This isn't really anything amazing or new, and it makes it seem like they're trying to tap into the elitist osx market. If that is indeed what they want, they should really check out [2]
So it's not really the software that's bad, really it's all what you can get on any other distro with a little work, it's their attitude about it.
I think it would be more accurate to say that they are trying to expand the Linux market by wooing those whose main barrier to using Linux is the UI/UX. Whether or not you find the endeavor to be "noble", the attempt is worth something to the Linux landscape even if your takeaway is "don't run it quite like them".
Woa. Wait a minute. They're merely asking for a donation, which can be set to zero. What's the issue with that? This entitled attitude is what irks me about the OSS movement at large. To a larger extent it puts me and people like me off of open source. More projects should take this approach. I thought that it's free as in Liberty, not as in ride. That's what we're constantly told.
If you don't see much difference between the UX of the two DE's, I don't think the difference between the "request for donations" UX is that big either. Perhaps there should be some smallish text saying "$0 is a valid custom amount", but that's it.
Now, there are of course issues to be discussed about this kinds of donations requests, such as, for example, how much of the funds received make it upstream to the developers whose software distros are repackaging. But I have nothing against the idea that you might be asked whether you'd like to pay for the software or get it for free, with the understanding that both are equally valid options, even if the website is designed to suggest that they'd much prefer if you paid them for their service (added software and distro maintenance). I see nothing there that implies that I am a thief, or even a free loader, if I decide to pay null dollars for their distro. You can view it as either a free project that emphatically asks for donations (which sounds OK), or a paid free-as-in-freedom software project that allows you to get it for free if you don't want to pay (that is also valid, it's like Fedora and Red Hat, except in this case it's the exact same distro, as opposed to "practically the same").
Not saying their site is useful, btw, I had to dig through their blog to even know what ElementaryOS was. But I don't think asking for (optional) payment is the issue there.
Ok, that's a bit different, specially if they mean that in the general, unless they are contributing directly to every single project they package with their distro and paying every contributor.
They are still within their rights to decide that their add-ons are proprietary non-zero cost software, at least those add-ons that don't link GPL code/modify LGPL code. But if their main value added is indeed modifying GPL code, and they would consider people who share those modifications for free or get them for free from a third party to be "cheating the system", I can see the issue.
Why? Developing software requires man-hours, likewise modifying software. It's not wrong to want compensation for that, regardless of license. Or maybe you hold the opinion that everyone who releases software under the GPL are suckers who shouldn't expect anything?
No, they still can ask for money. Read my comments above, I actually defend their right to make paid download the default. What they cannot do is take code released under the GPL, themselves likely getting it for free, the accuse anyone who copies their modifications without paying them of "cheating the system". They can even outright sell that software and not allow $0, that's fine, but someone will likely put a mirror up, and that person isn't "cheating the system", is playing by the same rules everyone else is. For the record, I have paid for (some) GPL software, and I still don't think it's any less valid to get it for free (most free software I have ever used is also free as in price, so...).
(archive.org link because this info doesn't seem to be on their new site, for whatever reason...)
There are other technologies like Switchboard and Granite that are unique to Elementary OS, and many of the user-facing apps were written from scratch.
Please take a look into the website and the history of Elementary. It's a huge undertaking, not merely 'a skin'. It has it's own HIG for design, a beautiful and consistent design language, and a nice set of custom-made default apps. Pantheon, the UI layer, is written from scratch, not based on Gnome, and has it's own API for writing apps in Vala.
I recall one "tale" that about a time when SCP failed to secure everything all at once, and a normal guy is detailing the world basically falling apart as long as he can.
In the right hands a lot of these stories could make magnificent movies, but that's a long shot.